For a while now I’ve been enjoying playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, weird for me I know, considering how much I hated Call of Duty 4, but the Spec Ops missions in online multiplayer have been totally worth it, especially the survival modes, which I’ve been playing for hours and they’re still damn good. Which is just as well, because I found the campaign to be rather disappointing. But the main merit of the Call of Duty games which everyone goes on about is the multiplayer. Personally I’m not a fan of competitive multiplayer, especially on a popular title such as this one as it’s an overwhelmingly massive magnet for wankers, and people who want to win at all costs. Personally it completely ruins the game experience when you have dickheads online but for a brief moment I thought I’d give it a go (after all you can’t say you don’t like it if you haven’t tried it). Between myself and Rabit we can hold our own in the survival modes and have pulled out some amazing scores even on the harder levels, so I’m hardly a “n00b” or whatever derogatory Americanism you get called by playing online.

KillCam: best way of seeing how someone cheated just to get a kill point

So I thought that myself and Rabit could jump into a game, a Team Deathmatch game on the Village level. Seeing that I never play multiplayer here I am at lvl. 1, quite annoying since I’m lvl. 50 on Spec Ops. Within about three seconds of starting the map I was shot. I have no idea where it came from but all I know that from loading to movement I had milliseconds to move before I was killed. Ok so I joined in a game halfway but what I’d totally forgotten was that when you die it shows you a kill cam from your killer’s perspective. This however proves to be quite incriminating as for about 3-4 seconds on the replay of my death, you see my character standing still. Bearing in mind that I hadn’t even had control of the character yet due to the zealous loading bar, it decided to plomp my guy in the middle of a firefight and some rather dishonourable prick decided to rack up a cheap kill, by waiting until my character was active before shooting me as I was spawning. Didn’t catch his name though, otherwise he’d be in the Inferno.

The kill cam gets even more incriminating though as I watched another replay of my demise this time running towards someone with a sniper rifle in their hand. I could hear the single fire rounds so I was ducking and strafing, but the inevitable happened. I crocked it. Watching the kill cam I could see myself heroically weaving on the battlefield in this guy’s zoomed lens to see him fire off two rounds about 3 feet diagonally higher than my head. That’s what’s killed me? A wayward shot nowhere near me is the thing that has killed me? Is my interpretation of a Barrett .50 Cal round similar to that of Dead Space 2’s Line Gun which fires an arc of death now? Not only did the guy miss, it killed me, and then showed me how he gloriously fired over my head like a Chris Waddle penalty. I wouldn’t have minded the fact that I got killed AGAIN, but what does bother me is that I saw the entire replay of my demise to see that the guy didn’t even shoot me, yet got credited with the kill and I had to respawn. The worst part is then that the Kill Cam shows me that the guy completely missed, so I could see how I wasn’t shot yet mysteriously died.

So there you go, I don’t expect to be some kind of reaper in multiplayer CoD, but if people cheat then I will continue to boycott the multiplayer modes. Those modes are fun if you play in a private game, but unfortunately the chumps at Infinity Ward deemed it unecessary to be able to level up and earn callsigns in private mode, leaving you the only option of unlocking these at the mercy of all the online virgins and people who don’t know what sunlight is. It just goes to show that the people who have acquired high ranks in the multiplayer experience have mostly got there through cheating or knowing how to glitch the game their advantage. What a sad state of affairs.